


Mile Markers

by NyteFlyer



Category: Donald Strachey Mysteries (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon Gay Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 06:24:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/647539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyteFlyer/pseuds/NyteFlyer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you need a GPS, and sometimes you can just follow the stars….</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mile Markers

**I’m beginning to get drowsy. There’s nothing I’d like more than to just curl up with Donald, close my eyes, and let the painkillers do their job. He’s still a ball of nervous energy, however, and whenever he’s like this, neither of us get much sleep until he works it out of his system.**

_I don’t handle this stuff well. I never handle this stuff well. I know this, but there’s not a whole helluva lot I can do about it._

**He hasn’t taken his eyes off me since we left the hospital, and the fear in them cuts through me more deeply than the shards of windshield the doctor pulled out of my face.**

_We were lucky. I know this, too. The wreck could have been a lot worse than it was. That’s the problem, see. The could-haves. I came out of it without so much as a scratch, but I could have lost Timmy tonight, really fucking lost him, and God knows if anything happens to him, you might as well put a gun to my head and pull the trigger._

**With the exception of a few cuts and bruises and a pulled muscle or two, I’m all in one piece. I’ve spent the past couple of hours doing my best to reassure him, to let him know that I’m still here and still his. He hears the words, and on an intellectual level, he processes them. Allowing them to truly sink in is another matter.**

_I know I’ve gotta get it together. It freaks him out a little, seeing me freak out like this. But for most of my life, I had nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. Then along came Timmy, and all of a sudden, I had everything. The kicker is, at times like this, all I can think is that I have everything to lose._

**Donald has huge abandonment issues. Who can blame him? His father ran out on him when he was a child, his friends turned their backs on him when he was outed, his family virtually disowned him. And Kyle….**

_I lost everything once.   I can’t go through that again. I won’t go through that again._

**I’ve got to bring him out of this, to pull him out of that dark place he goes whenever he’s forced to confront my mortality. Talking obviously doesn’t help. It never does. Some scars simply run too deeply for words to touch.**

_Timmy…God, what would I do without Timmy? Even now, he’s stroking my face, smiling, pulling me down for a kiss. Typical. He’s the one who’s all banged up, but he thinks he has to take care of me._

**Trying to smile pulls at the cuts on my face, and I feel a sharp twinge.  I can handle it. It’s more than worth the pain to see him smile back at me. His grin looks a little forced, a little lopsided. Hopefully I can get him to relax so the next one will come more easily.**

_He’s gonna be so sore tomorrow. In spite of the drugs, he’s hurting now. I can tell by the way he catches his breath a little when the bed jiggles, even though he’s trying to keep it on the down low so I won’t notice. He should have stayed overnight like the doc wanted him to. I would have stayed with him, sacking out right beside him on that hospital bed if that’s what he wanted. It’s not like I haven’t done it before or that he hasn’t returned the favor. But he wanted to come home, and when Timmy wants something, you might as well just give in and let him have it from the start and save yourself a whole lot of headache and misery. He always has to have the last word, and he’s just gonna keep on talking until he gets it._

**I admit that I have a stubborn streak. Donald and the E.R. doctor both wanted me admitted overnight, and I suppose a more reasonable man would have agreed to it. Still, I’m glad I insisted on coming home and that Donald had the good sense to accommodate me. It’s so much more comfortable here in our own bed, surrounded by our own things in the privacy of our own  home.   We need this quiet time together.  He needs it even more than I do.**

_He did it for me, of course. Don’t think for one minute that I don’t know exactly what he’s up to. I’ve seen that look in his eye before. He should gobble some more pills and get some rest, but will he do that? Oh, hell, no.  He thinks I’m kind of a basket case right now, and that the only thing that’ll distract me is sex._

**That’s the way it works when you’ve loved someone for as long as I’ve loved Donald. I know exactly what he needs, and I have every intention of giving it to him.**

_He’s probably right._

**I slip my hand under the covers and caress the soft skin of his flank. He startles a little at my touch, sucks in a quick breath, fighting his inevitable, involuntary physical reaction.**

_Damn it._

**It’s almost funny, watching the wheels spin in his head.  He’d never dream of ignoring my overtures because he’s too afraid of hurting my feelings or making me feel rejected.  At the same time, he’s trying to fight it, wanting to be altruistic and abstain, for my sake, from the one thing that will make him feel better.**

_He’s grinning again, and with his face cut up like this, I know how much that’s gotta hurt. Moving in general’s gotta hurt. Sex should be the last thing on his mind right now. He always puts my needs ahead of his own, and I love him for it, but…._

**I ease onto my side and press against him, suppressing a groan as my muscles grumble in protest. When I feel his cock twitch through his thin cotton boxers, I know I have him exactly where I want him.**

_Sometimes I think the fucking thing’s got a mind of its own._

**Donald groans, not trying to suppress it at all, and wriggles against me. Crotches aligned, we rock together gently. In spite of the drugs and the discomfort, I experience an inevitable physical reaction of my own.**

_He’s getting hard. He’s pumped full of drugs and shaken up and in pain, but he’s still getting hard. Maybe he isn’t just doing this for me after all. Maybe it’s a comfort thing. Maybe he just really needs to be close to me the same way I need to be close to him.  Or maybe, after the shock and confusion and adrenalin rush from the accident, he’s just horny. That’s my Timmy, a man who always rises – so to speak – over adversity._

**The harder I get, the less aware I become of my strained, aching muscles and the stinging cuts on my face. Pleasure, it seems, is a far more effective analgesic than Percocet. Besides, the more I move around tonight, the less stiff I’ll probably feel in the morning.**

_At the moment, he’s obviously feeling no pain. Still, his body’s been through a lot, and I’ve got to keep my head and take it easy on him, be extra gentle so I don’t accidently hurt him. I wouldn’t hurt my baby for anything in the world._

**Our lips meet, and it feels so much better than I remember. It always feels so much better than I remember. From one time to the next, I always forget how easy it is to lose myself in Donald’s kisses, how easy it is to lose myself in Donald.**

_I lose myself in Timmy for long, liquid moments and never want to be found again._

**I taste blood and hope he doesn’t notice.**

_I taste blood, and it jerks me back to reality. A small cut at the corner of his mouth has opened, and the sight of fresh blood makes me rethink things. But he’s staring up at me, both hands cupping my face and his eyes full of such want and need…_

**I can’t let him think too much. I can’t let him back out on me now. I hook a leg over his hips, pulling him closer.**

_…that I couldn’t call it quits even if I wanted to. I kiss the blood away, then let my lips travel to the other cuts and scratches on his face. Most of them aren’t deep, thank God, and probably won’t scar. Not that he’d be any less beautiful if they did, but he’s sensitive about his looks and even a little vain, and I know he’d worry that I might not be attracted to him anymore. As if that could ever happen._

**His kisses my sore spots with such care it almost unnerves me, makes me wonder if some of the cuts might be deeper than I realize. I hope none of them leaves a mark. Donald loves me for who I am, appreciates me because of what lies beneath the surface, but there’s no denying he appreciates the surface as well.**

_He oughtta know by now that I don’t give a damn about his scars. He’s so surreally beautiful inside and out, I almost need those tiny flaws to remind me that he’s human.  To prove the point, I kiss the faint indentation on his forehead and the deeper groove between his brows, then trace them with the tip of my tongue. Both are reminders of the playground bully who shoved him out of a swing on the first day of kindergarten, sending him sprawling face-down on the gravel. He’d broken his glasses that day, and if I’d been around back then, a certain bully’s head would have been broken, too._

**In spite of the tenderness of his touch, I feel the anger swell in Donald as he pays homage to my imperfections. He’s thinking again, and that’s never good.  I slide a hand beneath the waistband of his shorts and stroke his hips, squeezing first one baby-soft cheek and then the other, eliciting another full-body wriggle.**

_He’s fondling my ass. God and Jesus Mary mother of Christ, he’s fondling my ass, and he knows I can’t think when he’s doing that. He’s no fool, my Timmy._

**I’m no fool. If I don’t get him back on track, he’ll start obsessing, and the festivities will be over for the evening. Worse, by this time tomorrow he’ll have located Charlie Stenson, the schoolyard terror who pushed me out of that swing so many years ago, and have Kenny staking out his house.**

_Tomorrow I might just see what I can dig up about ol’ Charlie Stenson, maybe find out where he’s living now and have Kenny stake out the bastard’s house. But for now, Timmy’s here and he’s got a hand down my shorts, and all that expert groping  deserves a reward._

**Donald’s hand finds its way into my shorts as well, and I buck and grind against him, going a little wild from the familiarity of his touch, the casual intimacy of his finger slipping between my cheeks and stroking my opening. I’m rather surprised by the force of my own reaction, though I don’t suppose I should be.   I know how to push Donald’s buttons, but he certainly knows how to push mine as well.**

_Timmy’s going a little crazy now, bucking and pitching like that mechanical bull I rode – or at least tried to ride – in the redneck watering hole I used to frequent back when I was young and stupid and did my drinking courtesy of a fake I.D. He loves it when I touch him there, loves it when I touch him anywhere, really. But if he doesn’t take it down a notch, every muscle in his body’s gonna be screaming  by tomorrow morning._

**As good as it feels, I can’t help thinking that if I don’t calm down and pace myself,  I might live to regret this.**

_To make sure he doesn’t regret this later, I tighten my hold on him and carefully roll him onto his back, stilling his body with the weight of my own. He looks up at me, panting and wild-eyed and expectant. One eye looks a little wilder than the other. His right one, the one that connected with the passenger door when I rolled the car, is almost swollen shut, and he has the beginnings of a world-class shiner._

**Donald’s body, heavy and warm, pins me to the mattress, and I stop bucking and force myself to settle beneath him, enjoying the pulsing weight of his groin against mine, the soothing whisper of his lips against the puffy soreness of my eye.**

_This isn’t the first time that eye’s come in contact with a harder and more immovable object, and he has the scar to prove it. My lips brush over the bruising, earning me a soft, sexy sigh from my honey.  Between the two of us, Timmy’s definitely the one with the caretaker gene, but I’ve never known him to turn down a little TLC when I offered it. I kiss the bruise again, then moved on to the pale crescent just beyond the corner of his lid, remembering Todd Crenshaw, the little weasel, and how he screamed like a girl as I pounded his face into hamburger._

**He lingers over the curved scar by my eye, and I once again thank God that no one knows the humiliating story behind it, that everyone – Donald included – was willing to accept my explanation without question.**

_He walked into a doorframe? Come on. That’s a pretty lame excuse, even for a liar as inept as Timothy Callahan. I asked him about that mark the first time we made love and went on red alert when I saw how upset the question made him. Being a gentleman – and not wanting to take his mind off what turned out to be the best goddamned sex of my life – I let it ride, then grilled a couple of his friends about it as soon as I got the chance. He’d lied to them, too, of course, but they knew the guy he used to date well enough to add two and two together and come up with an answer that made me fucking furious. I caught up with Crenshaw two hours later and left him with a scar or two he’d be too embarrassed to talk about himself._

**Everyone has scars they prefer not to discuss, after all, and not all of them are visible to the naked eye. It took years for Donald to tell me what happened in the army and how he got that faded shrapnel wound his phoenix tattoo hides so effectively. I was always drawn to that spot on his back, realizing on some subconscious level, I suppose, that to know and understand the story behind it would be to understand why Donald is Donald. He never volunteered any information, however, and knowing how reticent he can be, I never asked.**

_Knowing what an evasive bastard I can be, Timmy never asked me how I got the scar on my back, and I felt like a first-class jerk for waiting so long to tell him. Even before he knew the story behind it, he was obsessed with that small, puckered spot of flesh, honing in on it during foreplay or in the  afterglow to touch it, kiss it, suck on it like he was drawing poison from a snakebite, intent on draining the pain out of me and taking it into himself. Even now, his fingers find it, rub it gently._

**Without conscious effort, I’ve found that old wound and catch myself rubbing it as if I can erase whatever residual pain lingers there. Foolish of me, I suppose, but Donald doesn’t seem to mind. He sighs and nuzzles my neck, then shifts off of me long enough to peel off first my shorts and then his own. Once he’s settled, he starts rocking against me again, this time controlling the pace. He’s being very deliberate, taking it slow and easy, being careful not to let himself go crazy and hurt me or let me hurt myself.**

_Timmy moves beneath me, matching my meticulously easy rhythm. I want to draw it out without wearing him out, you know? To make him feel relaxed enough and good enough to get a decent night’s rest._

**No athletics tonight, and that’s probably just as well. I’m more tired than I realized…**

_He doesn’t even know how tired he is…_

**…and this gentle, easy frottage…**

_…and a little bit of low-key loving…_

**…will be just the right thing to ease us both into sleep.**

_…will put us both in our happy place and take us down for the count._

**Donald pulls back from me just a little, supporting most of his weight on his hands. He’s trying to be a gentleman, to avoid putting too much pressure on my various and sundry bumps and bruises, but I want to feel his skin against my skin and his hair brushing my face, his breath against my neck and his warmth….**

_I’m trying to be a gentleman and take my weight off Timmy for a while, but he’s got other ideas. Those elegant hands of his glide up and down my torso, his fingertips tracing the pattern of bullet scars that spread across my chest like a constellation. I used to have a nice chest…_

**Donald has such a gorgeous chest…**

_…until I spied on one cheating husband too many, one who was packing a helluva lot more firepower than I was. I nearly died in the alley that day, would have died later in the E.R. if Timmy hadn’t shoved his way past doctors and nurses and cops and God knows who else to grab my hand and order me back from whatever dark and far off place I was headed for. I fought him at first, not wanting to deal with the pain and the light and the noise, but he wouldn’t take no for answer. He never does._

**…and as much as I love looking at it, I want to feel it against me, to know his heart’s beating against mine. I want to feel Donald, all of him, and I’m not about to take no for an answer. I pull him down for another kiss and continue tugging at him until he stops fighting me and finally stretches out, covering every inch of my body with every inch of his own.**

_I’m a weak man. I know I’m a weak man, but I can’t hold out on Timmy, not even when it’s for his own good.  So much for my noble intentions, right?  But it feels so good to lie here like this, moving together in an easy rhythm, chest against chest and belly to belly, his tongue tangling with mine in a warm, wet mating dance before slipping free to follow the path of the scar on my upper lip._

**With the tip of my tongue, I follow the vertical line on his upper lip. Our friends assume it’s a battle scar and think it makes him look tough, but it speaks to me of pain, even if it is a pain he can’t remember. Old wounds do eventually heal, I suppose, but they never go away. If I could make this one disappear, I would.**

_Damned scar. If I could change one thing about the way I look, that would be it. It’s been with me longer than conscious memory, though I know I couldn’t have had it forever. I never asked my mother about it, never wanted to learn its history, assuming that since she and my grandparents never volunteered any information, whatever happened to me was something I’d just as soon not know about._

**How could a father, even a drunken one, do something like that to his son? And how could a whole family – even a mother, for God’s sake – turn a blind eye on it when he did?**

_Timmy knows the whole story, I can see it in his eyes, though I’ve got no clue how he found out. I’m not so sure I want to know how he found out._

**Donald says he doesn’t know how he got the scar, and I believe him. He was too young and too traumatized to hold onto the memory, and I’m grateful for that.**

_Timmy’s gone still beneath me, watching me in that spooky way of his, making me wonder how far off he is from actually being able to read my mind. For no good reason I can think of, I waver, wondering if I should ask him to show me that missing puzzle piece from my past, wondering if I’d like the picture it made once I saw it._

**If it’s up to me, he’ll never know how he got it.**

_I know better. And I don’t want to think about it anymore. Not tonight, and probably not ever.  To distract us both, I bite his chin, sinking my teeth in just enough to get a good grip without causing pain and snarling like a rat terrier as I shake his face. He laughs and swats my ass, then arches up, grinding his crotch into mine in a way that turns my brain and my banged-up knees to room-temperature Jell-O._

**After all these years together, it’s hardly surprising that there’s an almost ritualistic aspect to our lovemaking, a certain pattern we follow more often than not. I’m not saying we do it by rote, because that’s definitely not the case. We simply have a few well-worn paths we habitually follow.**

_Timmy knows what I like, and he never seems to get tired of giving it to me. I kiss the faint teeth marks I’ve left on his chin, lick the scar there, a souvenir from an ice skating pile-up during his seminary days. And to complete the circle or maybe for luck, I touch the surgical scar on his left side, remembering another night when I could have lost him but didn’t._

**I’ve travelled this particular path often enough to know when it’s about to end.  We pick up the pace almost imperceptibly, barely breaking a light sweat, and when climax comes, it’s a relatively mild but infinitely satisfying release.**

_I’m yawning almost before I finish coming, and so is he. Mission accomplished. I force-feed Timmy another pain pill, then straighten the covers and turn off the light. We settle in together, sleepy and content. Tonight hasn’t been about blazing new trails or trying something exotic. It’s been about macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, Campbell’s chicken soup and that killer apple crisp Timmy’s Aunt Moira makes every fall. It’s been about sharing sexual comfort food  made from a recipe we both know by heart._

**I whisper that I love him. Donald whispers back, pinching the tip of my nose before wrapping an arm around me and kissing me goodnight. On nights like this, it’s comforting to stick with the tried and true, to follow the course of least resistance, going from point A to point B to point C without having to put any effort into plotting the course.**

_We don’t even have to think about it. I guess you could say we just follow the stars – or in this case, the scars – my internal GPS in sync with his as we go from oldest to newest…_

**We began at very different spots on the map, Donald and I, but if we follow those familiar mile markers…**

_…from the dent in his forehead to the line on his chin…_

**…from the cut on his upper lip to the marks on his knee he got from playing football and getting thrown from that damned mechanical bull …**

_…from the crescent moon by his eye to the scar on his side…_

**…from the carefully camouflaged pucker on his back to the fading constellation on his chest…**

_…and we always end up at the same place._

**…the separate paths we’ve travelled eventually merge into one.**

_We’ve both seen some tough times…._

**There’ve been a few bumps and twists along the road….**

_…and each of us has strayed off course and fallen into a pothole or two along the way…_

**…and each of us has had his share of loneliness and pain.**

_…but those scars of ours, they’re just friendly reminders that we’re stronger together than apart._

**The point is, as long as we have each other, none of that really matters.**

_Timmy and me, we’re in it together, both of us ready and willing to pick the other guy up if he stumbles, to carry him when he’s tired, to help him find the way._

**When I first met Donald, he was wandering, lost.  I didn’t even realize it at the time, but I suppose I was, too.  But we were lucky enough to find each other, and as a result, found ourselves. Now we travel in perfect tandem, he and I, and in spite of what our original destinations might have been, there’s only one place either of us wants to be at the end of the day.**

_No matter how many detours we've taken or speed bumps we’ve tripped over, we always end up at the same place._

**_Home._ **


End file.
